Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Aboriginal crime and punishment: spending on jails but not outcomes

The rise of a punitive "law and order" culture in Australia has had a profoundly racial dimension, manifested in soaring rates of indigenous incarceration. The number of indigenous adults held in the nation's jails has increased for the 11th year in a row -- as Crikey revealed in part one yesterday -- while over the past decade the indigenous imprisonment rate has outstripped the non-indigenous rate by a factor of 11, ballooning more than 47%. The non-indigenous rate grew 4% in the same period.

This shift towards the use of crime and punishment as a tool of social control -- known as "governing through crime" -- has led to the rise of a "risk agenda" that concentrates on the risk of crime occurring, not just actual crime. In this society of heightened fear and increased surveillance, punishment is increasingly targeted at those on the periphery. And no group lies more at the periphery than indigenous Australians.

That outcomes for Aboriginal Australians are deteriorating in all but a select few areas has been confirmed by virtually every government report released this year. Here is an extract from just one -- the Productivity Commissions latest Closing the Gap report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators, released in August:

"Nine years after this series was commissioned, there is still a considerable way to go ... Wide gaps in average outcomes remain across most indicators. Of the 45 quantitative indicators in the report, for example, available data show improvement in outcomes for only 13 indicators ... For 10 there has been no real improvement, while for another seven, including social indicators such as criminal justice, outcomes have actually deteriorated."

Some of the most shocking indicators are in the area of health, where hospitalisation rates are vastly higher for indigenous men and women than for other Australians.

Ratio of indigenous to non-indigenous rates of hospitalisation

Reason for hospitalisation Women Men

Injuries caused by assault 31 7

(i.e. hospitalisation rate for indigenous women

31 times higher than the rate for

non-indigenous women)

Injuries caused by non-fatal family violence assault 31 25

Mental and behavioural disorders 1.5 2.2

Chronic disease:

End-stage renal disease 15 8Diabetes 5 3.5Circulatory 2 1.5

According to the same report, indigenous adults indicate having a disability that profoundly or severely restricts core activity at around twice the rate for non-indigenous people. They are also twice as likely to be recent users of illicit substances as other Australians and four times as likely to be homeless.

David Woodroffe, managing solicitor in criminal law at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency in the NT, says the Northern Territory intervention has invested heavily in institutions focused on punishing criminal behaviour, while providing minimal services to help those who turn to crime in the first place.

"There’s more policing in communities -- more police stations and police posts -- so more people will come to the attention of police, will be charged, get into the [criminal justice] process. But there’s no corresponding in relation to other services ... there’s no youth diversion programs, there’s no rehabilitation services, etc. So basically, government’s providing an impetus for detecting crime and prosecuting crime but there’s not the services there for reducing crime or turning people away from it. And that’s why we see, with the lack of services like that, people becoming entrenched in the criminal justice system."

"Half a billion dollars," Woodroffe says. "If that was invested in Aboriginal communities in just one area, if that was just health ... 99% of Australians wouldn’t object to improving the lot of Aboriginal kids and building schools and hospitals, or improving access to hearing or access to dialysis or helping people learn about diabetes. Virtually every single middle-aged person I speak to, they all have diabetes. None of them are taught simple things about nutrition. Investment in health could make a difference to the lives of so many people, and that’s just one tiny aspect."

The story is much the same in Western Australia, where jail is often the answer to problems of sickness, poverty and violence -- despite widespread recognition that contact with the criminal justice system perpetuates disadvantage and increases the chances of being a victim of violence.

"People are going to jail for things they shouldn’t be going to jail for," says Dennis Eggington, chief executive of the Aboriginal Legal Service WA. "This includes non-payment of fines, driving offences, offences that are committed because people are sick either with alcoholism, drug abuse or mental illnesses." Numerous state and territory laws aim to push the most disadvantaged deeper into the shadows of mainstream society, he says.

"Here at the ALS [Aboriginal Legal Service] we see laws that are designed to move Aboriginal people out of sight. These laws are mandatory sentencing laws; these laws are move-on laws; these laws are antisocial laws that all can lead to imprisonment or removal from an area. It’s the vulnerable people, it’s those people who are most disadvantaged, that are most subject to that scrutiny and that over-policing.

"Of course, Aboriginal people are among the most disadvantaged groups in Australia, so those laws by their nature are indirectly discriminatory."

Evidence also indicates courts deal out harsher punishment to indigenous offenders than others. The 2005 report by Hon Dennis Mahoney, Inquiry into the Management of Offenders in Custody and in the Community, found that indigenous offenders in WA were far more likely to be locked up "in the same circumstances and for the same crimes" than their non-indigenous counterparts:

"For all offence types except property offences, indigenous people were more likely than non-indigenous people to receive custodial sentences. For example, for violent offences, compare an indigenous 'imprisonment rate' of 23.5% with a non-indigenous imprisonment rate of 7.7%. For driving/vehicle offences, compare an indigenous imprisonment rate of 12.5% with a non-indigenous rate of 2.9% ... For [drink driving offences], the indigenous imprisonment rate was 13% compared to a non-indigenous rate of 4%."

The statistics paint a powerful portrait of a divided society, yet it is a picture of apartheid few are prepared to acknowledge, let alone combat.